The Campbell Award – and Why I’m Optimistic About the Future of SF

Sofia Samatar has won the Campbell Award for Best New SF Writer! Huge congratulations, Sofia! Her victory makes everything about the post below, written before I knew the outcome, even more true:

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This has been a challenging year for SF. It’s a year we’ve faced again the reality that sexism and racism and bigotry still exist here.

Yet I’d like to riff off of some thoughts I first saw Kameron Hurley express.

Because this is also the year in which the most celebrated book, no matter who wins the Hugo tonight, is Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice. And it’s a year in which it’s worth repeating the names of nominees for the Campbell Award, for Best New Science Fiction Writer, an award very much about the future.

I’m writing this before the award, so I don’t know who won. But the nominees speak for themselves.

That’s a ballot that looks more like a cross section of the WORLD than any other. This is a ballot that’s exciting and forward looking, in the diversity of the authors on it – their genders, their ethnicities, the nations they hail from and that they’ve lived in and live in now – and of the science fiction and fantasy themes that we collectively write on.

And if these are the best new science fiction authors, if these are the rising voices of SF, then I am profoundly optimistic about the future of science fiction and fantasy.

Fifty years ago this year, no lesser a dreamer of the future than the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King wrote that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”[i] I believe Dr. King was right. There are still some bad apples even in a community as progressive as SF. But overall, the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice. And we are the ones who bend it.